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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   4432 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 17, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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INTUITION ESSAY FINAL

My Intuition Essay contest, is concluded. Thank you to everyone who participated, I really enjoyed reading every entry! Voting is concluded. The winner is: @Pitt19802 with This Untitled Piece Comparing Statistical and Intuitive Approaches in Baseball and Politics. Mr. Pitt selected Stage Right Greensburg, a small local theater company in my home state of PA, to receive the $300 in prize money (I tossed in a little to cover fees). Mr. Pitt only threw his work in at the last moment, so let that be a lesson: never be discouraged, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take, shoot for the moon even if you miss you'll land among the stars, man in the arena, every dog has his day, gods stand up for bastards, even a blind squirrel finds a nut, etc. etc. ditto ditto.

Thank you to all of our participants, and I want to take one more opportunity to highlight their excellent work.

@TheDag entered Intuition in a Scientific Age

@f3zinker entered A Case For/Against Education, Intuition

@felipec entered My Intuition About Intuition

@Gaashk on a Jungian View of Intuition

and

@ryandv on Forming Connections via Similarity of Mental Models

@DaseindustriesLtd also wrote this piece on the topic but explicitly asked to be excluded from the competition, hoping to leave the field to the rest of us.

I want to take the opportunity to publicly thank @FiveHourMarathon for creating and running this competition.

In our era of user generated social media content, I think it's really easy to complain that what the internet strangers have put together isn't to your precise taste.

I think it's quite impressive to put your money where your mouth is and say, 'I'd like to see this space explore this particular topic, let's make it happen'.

I think this competition was very cool.

Thank you.

Can anybody who voted explain to me how the winner entry is superior to mine?

From what I can see this is what it said about intuition:

  • Grady Little may have made a decision based on intuition, Joe Maddon didn't

  • To improve intuition one must train

  • LBJ was intuitive, Obama wasn't

That's basically it.

This is what it didn't say:

  • What is intuition

  • What is the opposite of intuition

  • When is intuition helpful

  • When is intuition unhelpful

  • How complex intuition is

  • What intuition is comprised of

My essay at least attempted to answer these.

To me this is clear evidence of bias in this community.

And because Mottizens are very prone to commit converse error fallacies, I shall point out that this is not something specific to my essay, I also don't see how the winner is superior to this entry: Intuition in a Scientific Age, which also does attempt to answer some of the important questions, such was: what is intuition? I also would be interested in hearing why somebody who voted for the winner considered it superior to that one.

  • -12

So, I don't think I'm appropriately positioned to explain the rationale for why anyone voted the way they did, I'm not going to try to do that.

I think I agree that my essay did less to develop a mechanical working model of intuition than other entries.

What I was trying to shoot for was a somewhat more meta approach, how our culture values intuition, and perhaps devalues it in certain areas to our determent.

If you're of the opinion that I missed the mark on what I was shooting for, or just didn't care for it, you're certainly entitled to that opinion.

If you're of the opinion that other entries were more deserving winners, idk, perhaps you're correct.

Fwiw, I liked the essay you submitted quite a bit.

What I was trying to shoot for was a somewhat more meta approach

My essay was also a meta approach. I talked about the intuition necessary in writing, while writing about intuition.

If you're of the opinion that I missed the mark on what I was shooting for, or just didn't care for it, you're certainly entitled to that opinion.

No, my opinion is that your essay didn't touch the topic of intuition much. Which is why I wonder why the voters found it valuable.

But if you recall when I promoted all the participants I specifically said all the participants should be worthy of praise for attempting to write about such a nebulous concept, especially if they had never written about it before.

My feeling is that the people who attempted to write about the topic would have a different valuation of the essays than the people who just just read them. For example, what made you think of Grady Little and Joe Maddon when writing about intuition? I bet it was your intuition.

I also would be interested in hearing why somebody who voted for the winner considered it superior to that one.

You say in your submission you've been writing for over 20 years. I'm not sure how one could count that. I've started writing before my self-awareness kicked in, probably was 5, it was a fanfic for a book. But I guess you mean some professional capacity, in which case my career is shorter and my feedback will probably be deemed low-quality.

That's expected because your reactions to criticism here are self-absorbed – and not really conductive to high-effort feedback, which you ostensibly solicit. This post, too, opens with a combative, accusatory and embittered manner – or at least such is the impression it gives off – thus I am not very enthusiastic about reading on (having finished it: yep, no change). It's strongly reminiscent of JB/EB, who was so sure of his intelligence that yawns could only be evidence of the audience's inferiority, and who attempted putdowns of people getting warmer reception than himself.

You are not entitled to have your stuff liked, or even to have reasons for liking something more than your stuff explained. If you want to be liked, you should write for your audience, and if you want constructive criticism, it's also on you to make your readers find it worth their while. This is a bit tragic, no doubt – it makes improvement harder. To be fair, criticism does come with a cost. When @… huh, [deleted] now – criticized me, when people call me out on lazy errors or ignorance, I recognize those as minor (or not quite…) hits to reputation; but I am always very thankful, precisely because it's not easy to get tips for improvement. And flattered, because it means someone engages with my output enough to do more than downvote and move on. In the world that's drowning in content, where filtering trash and meh time-wasters on intuitive autopilot is a life-critical skill, that's a big deal: it means you have a credit of trust, for whatever reason, and should use it well.

In this friendly spirit of a fellow auteur, I submit some feedback. Don't get pissed if you can.

@Pitt19802's piece was, first things first, better written on a purely technical level. Not exactly New Yorker material, in fact I find its baseball section a bit too thick with typical journo tactics, almost a pastiche of DFW's Roger Federer as Religious Experience. But close: casual yet slick language; hooking with an apparent intrigue; developing the theme from multiple angles, talking a lot about mundane matters, yet every section being to the point. It all serves to explain intuition as an imprecise mastery of a domain that is based on talent and experience and sometimes is made obsolete, even net negative with formal methods; but developing the meta-level intuition that you should fall back on formalisms when they are available could be perilous, for there are high-value domains where the real meat is still not captured by any statistics; we as a society may have been too impressed with the progress of statistics and committed that error. That's more nuanced than your dismissive summary.

His finish is kinda weak, but then again that allows the reader to draw one's own conclusion, like me and you both did.

Second, it is just more human. Your text feels narcissistic, basically all about intricacies of your conscious experience of writing a post and thinking a thought – meta, self-referential, savoring tangents. In the span of 1179 words and less than 10k symbols, you say «I» and «me» like 100 times total – a 10% of your words directly refer to yourself (count precisely if you want, since you argue that metrics help improve over using raw experience; and admittedly, my texts also suffer from self-absorbtion). Do you know what I-talk is believed to indicate? (Here's a less trustworthy source, but more grounded in common perceptions). It takes you 338 words to get to say «But at this point I haven't said much about intuition, have I?». No, you haven't. You are not Jonathan Goldsmith (or if you are, you haven't made that apparent). I hate hate hate baseball, but some dude's shower thoughts are even less enticing, and it is very much not obvious how your process of random-walking through free associations would help us learn anything about intuitions we don't yet know from having done the same when doing the dishes or falling asleep or whatever. I recommend reading the reddit link above – many of my persistent failings indicated there also apply to your submission! Always prefer external examples to your own mental constructs if you want to make a point for anyone else.

Put another way, you fail to write for your audience. This is an extremely male-dominated space, both demographically and «spiritually». Women care about people, they like sharing experiences, reading each other's dreams and such. Men are crude beings who care about things and processes, most are are proud to scoff at psychology until they get sent to gulag sensitivity training and/or find estrogen patches in their son's closet; most mottizens are not even here because they like to discuss Culture War, they just feel the heat. Look how this place livens up when someone spergs out on a technical, real-life issue! Only questions of sex and dating, and maybe wokes shitting up muh games/hobbies, are hotter. I contend that the very topic of «intuition» is already on the verge of what the community intuitively finds not worth discussing, and is mostly saved by its relevance to the metis/episteme debate and the technocratic aspect of the culture war – matters of external reality.

Third, people may disagree with your actual argument, or at least find it unpersuasive. I know I do: if intuition is «encoded analytical thought», that's only true for very loose definitions of all words used, and maybe it says more about your own philosophy than about the general case – both people's usage of the word and their relationships with their own intuition. Practitioners acquire intuition in highly atheoretical domains as well, and it's not clear how this encoding can happen if not through experience. Sure, analysis – when possible – might help guide and correct rote learning, but the acquired System-1 «intuitive» judgement is only a product of repetition, trial and error; it both makes predictions the same expert wouldn't necessarily be able to make through explicit reasoning, and fails in a way explicit reasoning does not. Since you talked about chess; consider such phenomena as Polgar memorizing the chess board only when it has a legal position. Even mental practice is still repetitive object-level experience! What are concrete examples in favor of your model? You provide loose associations that do not allow to distinguish a better model.

There is that theory about four stages of mastery, that progresses from conscious incompetence to unconscious competence (leaving aside the complete ignorance, which is mainly added for symmetry, I think). You could cite that in support of your vision. Also, since you bring up ChatGPT: this was a good place to talk of the difference between expert systems, which really were all about analysis encoded into if-then statements, and neural networks which acquire imprecise and uninterpretable skills through training. Actually now that I think of it, this is a fertile field for investigation. We could discuss the neuroscience here: intuition-as-random-walk powered by default mode network (which you devote like a 1000 words to), intuition-as-encoded-experience (mainstream view) and intuition-as-encoded-analysis; and the difference between slow and deliberate and expressly analytical thinking, i.e. one using some explicit scaffold of abstractions. You could have written on any of that, instead of your introverted musings about being able to write a whole book and reflections on how your submission be received by mottizens, but ironically those very reflections spoiled the dish.

And finally, there's the boring detail that the winner managed to secure the contest declarer's (what's the general word? AIs fail me) endorsement before the voting was over. Such things bias the outcome and are bad practice.

But it's fair that your piece was ranked below that of Pitt's. I won't go into comparing him with TheDag, but for what it's worth, that would be a tougher call.

P.S. Regarding your reception of criticism, I must say it's incredibly rich of you to defend your work with «my writing style works: it attacks the right people, and repels the wrong people» yet accuse the Motte of bias. Do you mean we are biased relative to «the right people»? Maybe give up on us, then?

I contend that the very topic of «intuition» is already on the verge of what the community intuitively finds not worth discussing,

This was the case with me. I do like writing contests, participating more than judging. But I found I had nothing to say on the topic, and then realized I didn't even care to read anyone else's. Your post here is the most I've read related to the contest.

That's expected because your reactions to criticism here are self-absorbed

Did you actually read my reactions? Because this is what I actually said in reality:

If you want to talk about my style, my tone, or why I wrote that particular sentence, I would gladly discuss that somewhere else.

This clearly shows I am open to criticism (provided the person is open to criticism of their criticism).

You are not entitled to have your stuff liked, or even to have reasons for liking something more than your stuff explained.

Straw man fallacy. I never claimed I'm entitled to that.

This is why criticism itself can and should be criticized: it's often wrong.

It all serves to explain intuition as an imprecise mastery of a domain that is based on talent and experience and sometimes is made obsolete, even net negative with formal methods

But this is obviously false, as my example of chess grand masters clearly show: they rely on intuition.

That's more nuanced than your dismissive summary.

Nuancedly wrong. And it's his essay the one that dismissed intuition without even considering it valuable: it's exactly the other way around.

Your text feels narcissistic

And if it feels narcissistic it has to be narcissistic, right? If it glitters there's no other option: it must be gold. Once again the converse error fallacy.

Put another way, you fail to write for your audience.

If my audience is not interested in the link between intuition and consciousness, that's on them.

Third, people may disagree with your actual argument, or at least find it unpersuasive.

All contestants used variations of the same argument (System-1/2 thinking), which suggests there's some obvious truth to it.

But finally you might be on to something: the reason why this particular essay won is that Mottizens do not like intuition. So any essay giving any value to intuition was immediately dismissed.

Sure, analysis – when possible – might help guide and correct rote learning, but the acquired System-1 «intuitive» judgement is only a product of repetition, trial and error; it both makes predictions the same expert wouldn't necessarily be able to make through explicit reasoning, and fails in a way explicit reasoning does not.

You are ignoring the obvious counterfactual to your notion: what can a person do without System-1 thinking? The answer is nothing. Absolutely nobody is born with all that is necessary to do high-level "explicit reasoning".

Whatever important high-level "explicit reasoning" you have done of late, it would not have been possible without previous training.

You mentioned "mental practice" in this paragraph, why did you think that was related? Pure intuition.

You could have written on any of that

I could not have written about that before thinking about it. I only thought about it after writing my essay.

I could have deleted my essay and wrote a new one as you suggest, and I'll probably write that new essay at some point, but that would be more effort, effort that you yourself did not want to do, as you didn't enter the contest.

I find it rich that you criticize me for not doing something you yourself admitted were unable to do.

Actually now that I think of it, this is a fertile field for investigation.

And you realized that only after thinking about it, didn't you? So you realize it's not possible to think of something before you think of it.

This is one meta conclusion of my essay. And you finally see there's something interesting here, but that wouldn't have been possible without me first sitting down to write about it.

This insight is now going to be part of your future intuitions, whether you accept the value of my essay or not, or even the value of intuition. You cannot unthink what you already thought.

Maybe give up on us, then?

That's obviously the correct decision if you are completely unable to look at arguments objectively, which was the whole selling point of the community, but time and time again isn't realized.

I voted for TheDag, but, yes, this. It was very difficult to get through the shower thoughts introduction, it took me a few tries.

Mild disagree on this specific instance being gender coded in the way you imply. I like dreams and experiences posts as much as the next person, but the post in question did not hit any of the right beats for that. Descartes style exposition on how the writer was thinking some thoughts, and then had a few drinks, and thought some other thoughts, but then deleted them, and now is thinking some different thoughts isn't necessarily a bad essay (I enjoy Descartes), but doesn't describe any actual experiences or elicit any care. A feminine Connection themed intuition post would recount times the writer had used (or failed to use, despite an inner knowing) their intuition to make decisions and take actions that were important to them, and convey a sense of that importance through personal narrative.

Thanks for the vote! I thought my entry was rather banal honestly, I’d like to expand on the thought down the road with more research and a stronger tie in.

Fair!

To clarify. I don't mean it's feminine – rather, it's not strongly masculine in the way that talking of baseball statistics and political baseball (or heat pumps) is. Men do consistently care more about data, facts, processes, things; cue Damore's memo. (And women are more interested in dreaming, which is perhaps why they remember dreams better). If you've ever been on a group therapy session, you know how awkward, terse and inarticulate a typical man is when pressed to «open up about his inner experiences». Girls are naturally enthusiastic, and take this failure to be cute or cringe (depending on attractiveness). I posit that you can do that inner monologue stuff better, but it still wouldn't be as well-received here as an essay about civil engineering.

Do you know what I-talk is believed to indicate?

Not disagreeing too strongly, but I typically use I-talk to better convey my own bias and uncertainty. "I think", "it seems to me", "IMO", etc. are all meant to convey something like "I'm no objective arbiter of truth, so feel free to call me out on these points and you might change my mind."

This is maybe a bad habit, since I notice reading your comment that such statements seem unnecessary. When you say "you fail to write for your audience" I intuitively understand that as an opinion, rather than a hard assertion that this statement is definitely the objective truth.

I intuitively understand that as an opinion, rather than a hard assertion that this statement is definitely the objective truth.

Exactly!

I go to some lengths to reduce I-talk. This has several uses. First, it allows me to see more clearly how much is being said on the object level, versus vague attentionwhoring and showerthought-posting (which I've been accused of in the past), or in any case reduce the appearance of the latter. But also, on the side of prefacing claims with disclaimers of subjectivity – it's something of a political act. I oppose the expectation that obviously subjective opinions are to be coached in caveats, which only inflate the perceived lack of confidence and help the message be dismissed as waffling or idle musing. If I have an opinion, that's because I believe to possess sufficient knowledge to have one, for the purposes of speaking on the matter at all, and welcome others to prove me wrong. Excessive «I think» and «It seems» and such are probably (probably/possibly/maybe are a better way to communicate uncertainty, unless you see good reasons to doubt your knowledge, judgement or faculties) a product of that ghastly «nonviolent communication» theory that was invented to protect oversensitive people from... object-level criticism and causes to improve themselves. And on the other hand: this practice allows one to unduly increase the weight of one's words by contrast, when caveats are suddenly dropped. «But the truth is that my writing style works: it attacks the right people, and repels the wrong people» – implying both to know the truth of it working and an objective judgement of people's worth.

More radically: people always express subjective opinions, we have no way of knowing objective truths. Of course some things are said with more conviction – claims about relations of mathematical objects or commonly knowable physical facts carry the implication that they are settled matters and should be incontrovertible for everyone, while «Shin Sekai Yori is more interesting than western animation» or «that theory is ghastly» are mere admissions of personal judgement with the tacit recognition of non-universality; but even this difference is not clear-cut, we can still be mistaken or disagree about STEM stuff (as Pascal Descartes argued, the Devil can befuddle him even about arithmetic).

In the Universe described from my perspective with my priorities, good taste is essentially objective and good writers can be established just about as solidly as large prime numbers, barring some strong cause to update. But that's the Universe inside my head, I cannot know its precise relation to the real one, nor authoritatively claim to know it – only share my own perspective.

Those caveats are redundant and support a bad communicative practice.

In my opinion.

I believe (oops I did it again) your attitude toward communicative caveats to be broadly correct but unfortunately on this particular site not including them is a good way to get modded more easily. Hopefully one day you can also convince the mods here that they are mostly worthless.

It was better written and more engaging, for one, and reading it made me think of more interesting questions than your essay.

Really? Questions regarding intuition? For example?

People aren't robots, all things being equal they'll vote for the person who's more sympathetic.

Which is obviously wrong. This is obviously a cognitive bias (halo effect), and it's the exact opposite of what a judge should be doing: be objective.

As a fellow loser, I say lets maintain sportmanship about it. No need to be salty.

To be honest, I do think my post is better than the winner too, because that post despite being good was too light on exploring intuition, the whole point of the competition. But I intuited that post will win by a longshot immediately upon reading it. TheMotte like all places has its tastes and our job was to cater to that taste.

No need to be salty.

That's specifically why I mentioned the converse error fallacy. Just because somebody appears to be salty doesn't mean that he is.

I am asking the people who voted for the winner if they could explain why. I am genuinely curious.

To be honest, I do think my post is better than the winner too

I agree as well.

TheMotte like all places has its tastes and our job was to cater to that taste.

No, our job was to write an essay about intuition, the price was the motivation, not the goal. Just like the goal of a newspaper is supposed to be to inform the truth, not to make money. Pandering to a specific audience wasn't supposed to be the goal.

Just because somebody appears to be salty doesn't mean that he is.

Judgment of saltiness is in the eye of the beholder, or the hearer.

Judgment of saltiness is in the eye of the beholder, or the hearer.

And judgements can be wrong.

That's specifically why I mentioned the converse error fallacy. Just because somebody appears to be salty doesn't mean that he is.

You can just say “you’re wrong”, you don’t add anything by throwing in philosophical fluff. People know what it means to assert something.

You can just say “you’re wrong”

Yes, and you can throw insults as well.

The question is not what one can do, the question is what one should do. And in a rational discussion it's better to explain why the person is wrong, not just assert that he is.

But that doesn’t explain anything, I called it fluff for a reason, it adds literally nothing.

You have poor theory of mind if you think bringing up the converse error fallacy addresses some gap in their accusation in a way that is convincing to a human being familiar with the concept of assertion.

But that doesn’t explain anything, I called it fluff for a reason, it adds literally nothing.

It is 100% a fallacy, that's all the explanation that is needed.

You have poor theory of mind if you think bringing up the converse error fallacy addresses some gap in their accusation

If you don't see how an argument being fallacious is a problem, you are not a rational being.

lmao

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